Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

#AmAnth17 Wrap-Up: Anthropology Matters?

On Monday, I downloaded #AmAnth17 tweets.This proved in many ways elusive and piecemeal.First, the conference hashtags continue to
shift.Last year, the AAA finally
discovered that the #AAA hashtag had other meanings and other audiences, among
them AIDS activism in Japan and a pop music awards program in Korea (both of which
prompted lively Twitter conversations this year).Their efforts to promote alternative hashtags
resulted in confusion, with people tweeting at #AmAnth17 (the ‘official’
hashtag), along with #AmAnth2017 (which would have been logically consistent
with previous years) and, for the hell of it, #AAA2017. So the graph below includes tweets with any one of the three, with the top 50 Twitter users (by in-degree centrality) labeled.

Here are the general metrics on this network.

Graph Metric

Value

Graph Type

Directed

Vertices

426

Unique Edges

649

Edges With Duplicates

0

Total Edges

649

Self-Loops

145

Reciprocated Vertex Pair Ratio

0.047817048

Reciprocated Edge Ratio

0.091269841

Connected Components

100

Single-Vertex Connected Components

63

Maximum Vertices in a Connected
Component

245

Maximum Edges in a Connected
Component

445

Maximum Geodesic Distance
(Diameter)

12

Average Geodesic Distance

4.810299

Graph Density

0.002783761

It’s not an enormous graph, nor particular
connected. In many ways, it's similar to other graphs I’ve run in 2015 and 2016 (see. For example, we see the same, prominent Twitter
users. Here are the top 50 accounts by
in-degree centrality:

americananthro

profsassy

womenarchys

anthrofuentes

aprilmbeisaw

culanth

julielesnik

aba_aaa

sonyaatalay

hilaryagro

valorieaquino

altmetric

protest_matters

drtomori

jennyshaw011

lesleybartlett_

aunpalmquist

archyfantasies

twitatreyee

dukepress

stemethnographr

lauraellenheath

aaas_doser

pottershousedc

diane_tober

susangsheridan

blackfeminisms

afburialgrndnps

geekanthro

anthrosciences

stelynews

dcanthro

archpodnet

yarimarbonilla

oceaniajournal

beccapeixotto

mcclaurintweets

cvans

soclinganth

police_worlds

illinoispress

machristofides

anthroboycott

hildallorens

ratnagiri77

anthromuxer

tikabakic

camee_maddox

This is a great bunch of anthropologists and institutions,
but, compared to previous years, Twitter traffic has diminished and, with it,
topics have proliferated along lines of subdiscipline and sub-specialty. That is, anthropologists (at least in their
Twitter traffic) have retreated to the specifics of their panels and
papers. Here’s a word-cloud of the most
frequently occurring 500 words from the 2017 AAA:

Now here’s another wordcloud from the 2015 meeting.

The prominence of activist causes in 2015
(#BlackLivesMatter, BDS) stimulated tweets across subdisciplines in a way that
is conspicuously absent from this year’s conference with some notable (and welcome) exceptions (thanks, @yarimarbonilla, @aba_aaa and others!).

Of course, these causes are still with us, along with a
dumpster fire of authoritarian politics, fascism, rampant misogyny, ascendant
white supremacy and environmental apocalypse.
But, in all of this, where does anthropology matter? And if we can’t represent our united
opposition to, say, fascist policies in the U.S., then what hope do we have of
demonstrating the relevance of anthropology to anyone outside of this conference?

the exclamatory nature of Anthropology
Matters feels ineffectual. Are we trying to signal to the broader
intellectual community and American public that anthropology does indeed
matter? Or are we instead convincing ourselves that our choice of discipline
was legitimate, necessary?

Well--those are the questions. What will we--as anthropologists--do in the face of the palpable evil around us?